Last week (5-9 March 2013) Joomla was present at CeBIT 2013, the world's largest and most international computer expo in Hannover, Germany. We shared a booth called “CMS Garden” with 12 other open source content management systems (CMS). The idea behind this shared booth was to have all of the relevant open source content management systems all in one place. Two of those systems are, just like Joomla, in the top 3 of leading CMS systems: Wordpress and Drupal.

So who won?

Actually, CMS Garden wasn’t a competition between the different CMS systems. There was a very friendly atmosphere between all the volunteers from the different systems. Those volunteers talked with the visitors about open source software & the different systems. And when the visitors had specific questions about a specific CMS, we all directed them to the volunteers of that system.

I was poking around our very own Joomlacode.org site today and started looking at some recent download statistics. As you may know, reliable market share information for open-source CMS packages is hard to find, and it is especially difficult to assess recent trends. However, Joomlacode tracks all file downloads (including those from the one-click version updates), and these do provide some useful data. Here are some numbers I found interesting.

In the last six months (September 2012 – February 2013), we registered the following download counts for full packages (excluding the update packages):

Joomla 2.5: 1,725,268 (about 288k per month)

Joomla 3.0: 796,340 (about 133k per month)

During this period, we averaged about 420k downloads per month of our two flagship products.

As this is my initial public blog post I’d like to say “Hello and it’s nice to meet you!” I’m David Hurley and in case you’ve not seen the previous posts, I am the Community Development Manager for Joomla. I’ve worked with Joomla since before it was Joomla and have had opportunity to continue to develop in Joomla for many years. If you are interested in more of my bio, you can check out the official appointment post below (or ask me). But for now I’d like to move on to the good stuff. Over the last few days, I’ve had the opportunity to hear from a couple of great people wondering a bit more about what my role involves and what I’ve been able to work on so far. I think it’s a wonderful opportunity to provide a status report of sorts regarding how things are progressing, what’s been accomplished, and how excited I am about the future.

Reviewing the goals

In order to remind anyone interested of what was discussed previously, I want to first reiterate what my original job description defined as my five key areas of focus.

The goals of the Community Leadership Team (CLT) for 2013 are published below.

Goal A: Launch Joomla Volunteers portal

In 2013 we are are planning to launch a new Joomla Volunteers portal to make it easier to contribute to the Joomla community and track the progress of projects that people are working on. Part of this idea is to create a public marketplace to match skills, interests and available time of volunteers with the available project tasks. This also allows to thank the people involved within the Joomla project.

Goal B: Update community.joomla.org

The community.joomla.org site is using Joomla 1.5 and needs to be migrated to a recent Joomla version. Together with this migration the content needs to be reorganized and improved. The website should provide a complete overview of all news available around the Joomla project.

Watchful is a relatively new service that focuses on providing a unified dashboard that allows backups, updating, monitoring, and other services for multiple Joomla installations. This service has been created by a joint venture between Anything Digital who are also the authors of sh404SEF,and inetis, a Swiss-based Joomla consultancy company. We here at RocketTheme have been testing Watchful in an effort to make our demo server more manageable, and I wanted to take the opportunity to relay our findings and thoughts.

Our demo server is the home to more than 100 Joomla site installations each with their own set of extensions and configurations. In the past, the process of managing these sites and keeping them up to date, has been a very manual one, requiring one of our staff to painstakingly log into each site to update it. As you can imagine this has quickly gotten out of hand, and we went searching for a better alternative. We considered writing our own scripted solution, but then I spoke with Victor Drover of Watchful about their Watchful product and it sounded like a great fit.

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